#Europeans are piling into space stocks, and one standout winner is the fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust after its stock quadrupled in price

Spiral galaxy's brilliant heart shines bright in a new picture from NASA's Webb #telescope. The image released this week depicts the Messier 77 galaxy 45 million light-years away in the Cetus, or whale, constellation. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.

The galaxy’s active nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole that’s 8 million times more massive than the sun. Surrounding gas is sucked into a tight orbit around the black hole, becoming so hot that it radiates in the extreme. Webb’s mid-infrared instrument captured the stunning details.

The world’s largest and most powerful space telescope has been photographing the cosmos since launching in 2021.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

#WASHINGTON — #Lunar Outpost, a developer of lunar rovers, has raised $30 million as it works to revamp designs to meet #NASA’s revised Artemis #architecture.

Rocket Lab announces large launch contract and plans to acquire #space #robotics company

#WASHINGTON — A #spacecraft designed to raise the decaying orbit of a #NASA astrophysics satellite has passed environmental tests ahead of a launch as soon as June. Swift reboost mission completes environmental tests

#WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has nominated Lt. Gen. Douglas Schiess for promotion to four-star general and selected him to become the next chief of space operations, positioning a career operator to lead the U.S. military’s youngest service as it shifts toward more contested space missions.

#NASA to increase value of CLPS contract to support surge of lunar lander missions . #WASHINGTON — NASA is planning to increase the total value of a contract for robotic lunar lander missions to support a proposed surge in flights for the agency’s moon base plans.

In an April 27 procurement filing, NASA said it was planning to increase the maximum value of its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contract from $2.6 billion to $4.2 billion.

The CLPS contract includes 13 companies that are eligible to compete for task orders for specific missions. The current CLPS contract expires in 2028, with planning underway for a follow-on contract, called CLPS 2.0.

NASA has awarded task orders whose combined value is less than $2 billion to date, and with the recent pace of about two task orders a year, would have only come close to the contract ceiling in 2028. The large increase, though, suggests NASA is planning to award more missions or more valuable missions over the next two years.

Asked about the filing during an April 29 panel session at the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium spring meeting, Joel Kearns, deputy associate administrator for exploration in NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said he was not familiar with the document but that the agency expected to buy more CLPS missions.

“We’re looking into opportunities to buy into that ramp of demand for the very short term even as we work on issuing the CLPS 2.0 contract competition,” he said. “We have to start ramping now into this higher cadence, with a target of monthly landings, to bring some of the things to the surface very, very soon for Moon Base.”

At NASA’s “Ignition” event March 24, the agency outlined plans to develop a lunar base, simply called Moon Base, and with it a sharp increase in the number of robotic lunar landings. That included nine landings in 2027 and 10 in 2028.

That would be a sharp increase from current flight rates under the CLPS program. There were two lander missions in 2025, one by Firefly Aerospace and the other by Intuitive Machines. NASA is projecting up to four lander missions in 2026, by Astrobotic, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace and Intuitive Machines, although the charts shown at the Ignition event showed only two landings projected for the year.

That sharp increase has generated skepticism about NASA’s plans within industry, given recent flight rates and the time needed to develop a lander. NASA announced at Ignition a new CLPS award to Intuitive Machines, called IM-5, but that mission is not projected to launch until 2030.

Representatives of CLPS companies said on the panel that they can increase lander production but did not explicitly commit to the production rates needed to meet NASA’s projections.

“We’ve heard the call. We know this is NASA’s initiative, and we want to do more and more,” said Farah Zuberi, director of spacecraft mission management at Firefly. She noted her company now has three landers in production — Blue Ghosts 2, 3 and 4 — and has added new clean room space to support up to eight spacecraft at a time.

“There’s a lot of creative solutions that we can come up with,” she said. “Having that signal is really important. We know that this is coming. We can set ourselves up for success.”

Blue Origin is finishing testing of its first Blue Moon Mark 1 lander, called Endurance, at its Florida factory after performing thermal vacuum tests at Johnson Space Center, said Eddie Seyffert, director of civil space at the company. It is also manufacturing components for the second Mark 1 lander, which the company plans to use for NASA’s VIPER rover in 2027.

That work is done at Blue Origin’s Lunar Plant 1 factory, with 190,000 square feet of space “dedicated to making lunar landers to answer NASA’s call,” he said. “We’re excited about the challenge, and we want to show our stuff.”

Dan Hendrickson, vice president of business development at Astrobotic, said his company has already scaled up facilities to meet demand for its original CLPS mission. “We’ve got the basic DNA and roadmap” to meet higher demand, he said. “We’re starting from a place in which we have facilities that were intended to have multiple landers in development.”

One key issue is the supply chain for lander components, said Ben Bussey, chief scientist at Intuitive Machines. “The key, if you’re trying to ramp that up to multiple missions per year, is knowing you’ve got a supply chain that can do it in time, or bring things in-house,” he said.

He added that, on early CLPS missions, each lander was “slightly bespoke,” modified to meet the needs of its payloads. That’s less likely to be the case as flight rates increase. “I think you’ll see some form of standardization.”

“Going to build-to-print landers is maybe the response to the signal” from NASA’s Ignition plans, said Seyffert. “We’re going to build-to-print dozens of landers to help NASA achieve its goals.”

Turning moon ice into drinking water: A Canadian company’s challenge. As the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) moves towards establishing a permanent presence on the moon, a Canadian company is hoping to solve one of the biggest challenges for astronauts in deep space – accessing drinkable water.

The Canadian Strategic Missions Corporation (CSMC) was recently awarded $400,000 in grant funding after it won the Aqualunar Challenge, led by the Canadian Space Agency in partnership with Impact Canada.

The challenge aimed to identify innovative companies that could develop technologies “to purify moon water for human deep-space missions.”

CSMC was awarded the grand prize last month for its “LunaPure” technology, which the company says offers a sustainable and low-maintenance system to purify water trapped in the form of ice in the moon’s polar regions.

Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen and Artemis II crew set to meet Trump

#NASA’s #Artemis II capsule returned to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on Tuesday, almost a month after blasting off on humanity’s first lunar trip in more than a half-century.

Following its splashdown in the Pacific on April 10, the Orion capsule was trucked from San Diego to Cape Canaveral. Engineers will examine the capsule’s heat shield in more detail along with everything else in preparation for next year’s Artemis III docking demo in orbit around Earth. The capsule’s electronic boxes will be removed and recycled, along with research equipment.

The capsule, dubbed Integrity by its U.S.-Canadian crew, carried astronauts deeper into space than humans have ever traveled before. Aside from a finicky toilet, the capsule appeared to perform well during the nearly 10-day voyage, according to NASA.

Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada’s Jeremy Hansen are finally getting a break after medical exams and other tests that followed their mission.

“Been waiting for this moment,” Wiseman said via X late last week, posting a video of himself relaxing on the beach. “There is a lot in my head that I must process and very little has to do with leaving the planet. Today is my first step. I have never in my life felt peace like this.”

Until Artemis II, astronauts had not flown to the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Artemis III will feature a fresh capsule and crew. They will remain in orbit around Earth for docking exercises with lunar landers still in development by SpaceX and Blue Origin. That will set the stage for a moon landing by two new astronauts as early as 2028.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Marcia Dunn, The Associated Press